Stitches West was pretty awesome; I kept getting drawn toward handdyers’ booths by the smell of vinegar and damp wool, but I was good. I only bought the one kit. I thought about Clueless a lot.. the cool colorway is really pretty, but I came out with … maybe this one? I’ll have to check the pattern. It’s in my car still, as we haven’t unpacked most of it.

We had a nice couple of days with our friend Ed, and his girlfriend, then drove down to San Diego and visited with Ben’s brother Michael. We bought sheets for our bed (a California King — a great size bed for tall people, but a pain if you live anywhere other than California, if you want sheets that are a color other than white or tan), whole wheat pastry flour — the stuff we get in CO is coarser than the coarse stuff at Henry’s Marketplace, corn meal that is a uniform smallish size, unlike what we get here which is like corn flour mixed with rustic corn meal, and Maple Syrup at Trader Joe’s (32 oz for $11, not bad when we spent $8 for a 16oz bottle here).

Overall, it was a good trip. We saw plants growing, and it was nice. Ben’s mom was growing Broccoli at 4200 ft elevation. In February. And she had harvested once already. I won’t get to plant until at least May, and I think we’re going with the stuff that actually worked last year: potatoes and carrots. We’ll try tomatoes again, too. But all of that seems like a long way away when it’s snowing and cold and windy. The trip to California helped with that somewhat, to know that something’s growing SOMEWHERE, even if everything’s dead and cold and snowy here.

I started dyeing the first of the roving last night, and have prepared 5 100g skeins of Monkey Toes for dyeing, probably on Thursday. I’ve got another 5 lbs of superwash roving to dye, another 5 lbs of merino roving, and another 8 lbs of Monkey Toes to skein and dye. If I can get over this cold, I’ll be able to get an update of the crazymonkey etsy shop this week. The “stuff we have on etsy” shelf is looking a bit thin (which is a good thing as well as a bad thing).